LIGHT FROM LIGHT

by Carmine Benincasa

Icons are works of art that immediately point to and identify Byzantine Russian and Slav culture, the fruit of great Orthodox theology. Icons are unveilment and concealment, they hide bodies and leave faces unveiled: the face in the icon is the epiphany of the invisible. The icon is presence of the non-visible but not reality, trace but not event, a sign that alludes to the world we await and invoke in the liturgy, while we consume history through the limit of bodilyness. Icons do not narrate, they do not describe, they do not represent historical time, they are poetic fragments of faith, tiles of a vision that we await in our faith and that artists have had an early taste of in the ecstasy of doing their work of art.

Nevertheless, icons are not meant to be the ultimate reality, they are not an epiphany of the absolute: they are acts of faith that free the imagination and allow the believer beholding the work a crumb of heavenly bliss, helping him to bear the historical and daily condition of blame and sin.

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Ferdinando Ambrosino has been working for several years on an endless and expanding pictorial cycle on the icon. These paintings are his theological reflection, his revolution, which ignores ideological movements or theoretical references, a reflection that concerns only painting. Art is culture, it does not depend either on nature or on history (art intended as mimesis depends on nature). As culture, painting is independent of any context or historical reference, but identifies its genesis and the source of its inspiration: the Russian icon is the beginning of these works. It is work in progress that brings back to a vague form all the visual and historical experience of the artist and all the knowledge acquired along the process of formation of his conscience. But once arrived at the final outcome of the painting, freedom has become total and unconditioned.

With his paintings dedicated to icons, Ambrosino breaks equilibriums, shatters proportions and symmetries, destroys every certainty of his previous search. In these paintings, painting has become a search for movement that derives gratification from its own desiring, tension of quality, a search for new relations of energy, play and the will to ignore the static order of knowledge. In his icons, knowledge no longer signifies the reign of reason annotating its certainties, but is a place for floating the taste of a dissonant freedom, a symptom of another kind of perception of the real.

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